The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

Miranda also had all his equipment confiscated. He has done nothing wrong - there's no charges, no criminal suspicion, nothing at all. His only crime is being the partner of a famous journalist who, among other things, is one of the driving forces behind shining a light on the NSA's mass surveillance.

As awful and morally disgusting as this case is, it is sadly one more in a long chain.

In the beautiful corner of the world where I live, the Basque Country (Western Europe), the abuses can be counted by the tens of thousands: as many as 20,000 people have been arrested under antiterrorist laws since several decades ago.

You don't need at all to be an expert to figure out that the enormously huge amount of them were innocent civilians with no other relation to terrorism than the one the paranoia of the authorities made them imagine.

Oh, pardon me but you are intentionally missing my point and the point of the article, trying to convert it into a a debate about how bad terrorism is. Of course it is, I know it much better than you, probably.

I was not talking about terrorism, which in fact is very disgusting and deplorable. We are talking here about the *abuses* of the authorities taking advantage of exceptional laws for crushing and intimidating the civilian population and/or the dissidents which have not commited any crime. Don't you agree? Do you know what I am talking about? Want me to cite some other cases throughout the world/history in case you feel uncomfortable with the Basque Country affair?

Does the existence of terrorism justify cruel abuses and torture on innocents? Paramilitary Death Squadrons (ATE, BVE, GAL...you can wiki/google them) which killed hundreds too? Want me to cite Central America? (the backyard of the US, home of some of the world's most terrorised populations).

Read the title of Thom's post again; it contains "...abuses terrorism law to intimidate..."